Most of us are aware of our state and national economic crisis. But there is something else looming that few have noticed — and which will profoundly affect the way our country works.
Newspapers as we know them are imploding, maybe not quite as dramatically and rapidly as the domestic auto industry, but just as surely. Basically, the Internet has crushed two of the mainstays of the industry’s business model: Most classified advertising has migrated to free sites such as Monster.com, and Craigslist.
Meanwhile, most folks under 30 have largely quit reading actual printed papers, preferring to surf their content on the web. And despite frantic efforts, nobody in the newspaper business has figured out how to generate much revenue off web operations.
That has given a nearly lethal one-two punch to the revenue stream most newspapers need to survive.
Partly as a result, there are nearly 300 fewer daily newspapers today than in 1950, according to the National Association of Newspapers. Many of those left have suffered steep circulation declines, or are teetering on the brink of extinction.
Beginning next year, for example, The Christian Science Monitor will stop publishing the paper in print and, instead, offer subscribers a continuously updated version on the web.
In Michigan alone:
Both the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News have been intensely cutting staff for the past 18 months. I’d guess their newsrooms are down at least 10 percent — and down far more from the 1980s, when there was still a newspaper war between them.
There are persistent rumors that the leaders of the Detroit Media Partnership, the joint operating agreement company that is controlled by Gannett and runs both Detroit dailies, are considering eliminating print editions on at least a couple days of the week.
Booth Newspapers, Michigan’s second largest daily newspaper group, announced last week that all production work – copy editing, page design, graphics – for all eight of its newspapers would be consolidated in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. The company also announced a massive round of buyouts. Earlier, they virtually eliminated their large Lansing bureau.
It’s likely the Oakland Press, the Royal Oak Daily Tribune and the Macomb Daily – all owned by the financially troubled Journal Register Company – are on the market. Journal Register announced last week plans to sell an unspecified number of its daily and weekly newspapers.
Journal Register stock price is now around 10 cents.
Gannett, which bought in 2005 my old newspapers, including the Observer & Eccentric, will be moving staffers from suburban offices to the Free Press building in downtown Detroit. The presses that formerly printed the papers have been sold, and the Livonia office building is on the market.
OK. So I know what you are thinking: Things are bad everywhere and I ought to quit whining about my old trade.
That’s true enough, but there’s a dimension to the death of newspapers as we know them that deserves more than a passing note. For something like 200 years, in towns big and small all across the country, thousands of people we call “reporters” have roamed the highways and byways, persistently asking impertinent questions.
These questions – and the news stories that arose from them — have made up the stuff and substance of newspapers and helped frame the debate for our democracy for as long as we can remember.
Sometimes these questions were well put; sometimes not. And sometimes the newspapers were good, tough and accurate; and, well, sometimes not.
But the main work of newspapers always has been to inform the public – whether about doings in their hometown’s town hall or what is happening in our nation’s capitol or, indeed, around the world. The basic idea behind all this is that you cannot have a democracy without an informed citizenry and an institution whose job is to speak truth to power.
There will be fewer and fewer reporters roaming the streets as the industry continues its decline. There already are; the American Society of Newspaper Editors estimates a drop of 2,200 since 2001.
What may be worse is that those who remain will be increasingly concentrated in big cities like Washington and New York and Los Angeles.
So who’s going to find out what’s really going on in Livonia or in Marquette? There used to be 50 or so reporters based in Lansing. Today, I’d be surprised if there are 10 left. Who’s going to keep tabs on all the shenanigans going on in our state capitol?
I believe the implosion of the newspaper industry is going to produce a grave crisis made worse by the fact that, like poison gas, it will largely be invisible: We will have a citizenry that progressively knows less and less, and a bunch of people in power who come under less and less surveillance by a declining number of journalists whose fundamental responsibility is to the public at large.
You know what happens to precious things in a world without watchdogs.
It doesn’t make for a pretty picture.
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Editor’s Note: Former newspaper publisher and University of Michigan Regent Phil Power is a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics, and a former chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He is also the founder and president of The Center for Michigan, a centrist think-and-do tank which publishes the Michigan Scorecard. The opinions expressed here are Power’s own and do not represent the official views of The Center. He welcomes your comments at ppower@thecenterformichigan.net
2 Comments
Thanks for this Phil. I hear your concern for your old colleagues in this post. And I am as astonished by you at the near light-speed velocity of it all, rue the loss of coherence in our political and economic lives. I hope you’ll indulge me a few observations.
Right now, I am not reading a newspaper; I am interacting with a news-maker. One of the leading lights of Michigan’s future. That fresh, crisp newspaper that lands at my doorstep every morning, the one I take up with a cup of coffee in the morning before the kids wake up, does not let me interact with thought leaders.
So there’s a clue for you.
For national news I “go” to WDC on the web. I’ll maybe read coverage on the same story once in the Washington Post and once in the Washington Times. On an international issue I’ll fetch out to the London “Independent” for the Tory view and to “The London Times” for the Conservatives view. That’s what you have to do these days: each side either ignores facts that are relevant to the other side or emphasizes different aspect of the same facts.
If there was a doubt before the 2008 election, that doubt should be gone by now: there is no objective journalism anymore; even in the smallest local stories. Speaking as a news-consumer: You cannot sell Volvos & Birkenstocks, or F-150’s & guns being objective. Maybe you never could; but I’d trust your judgment on that. (An idea for a future post?) Maybe we needed the web to show us that there never was an impertinent question raised that did not have an agenda, that did not get close to “news-making” instead of “news reporting”.
Back about 10 years ago, at Schipol (the Amsterdam Airport), my brother in law asked an “impertinent question” of Benjamin Netanyahu as he was passing through to meet with Yassir Arafat at the White House Rose Garden. My brother in law asked Netanyahu if he would shake hands with Yassir Arafat. Now, my brother in law was, and still is, a journalist working for a Christian news organization based in northern Europe. The question made international news – as much because of its impertinence, but because it had the practical effect of setting up the expectation of a handshake. The question had an agenda: as a Christian he wanted to see peace (and so do all of us) and it was a way of actually shaping the news by shaping the event.
I’m not sure I like this either.
Perhaps the best we can do is focus on keeping the market place of ideas healthy even as some newspapers go out of business. (i.e., Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”) As we have seen in the financial markets; the government did not do such a good job of watching the market. Let us turn our energy to watching the watchers, and not let the government foul up the marketplace of ideas. That means keeping an eye on the “journalists” working for Fox and NBC. And resisting that Orwellian-nightmare – the so-called “Fairness Doctrine”.
Suggestion: Local news media workgroups should find a way to get local content on mobile phones; maybe charge a $1.25 dollar a week to a cell phone account to be able to download a report on the local school board meeting; new stores openinng, best place in town to buy gas, see your kid on the honor roll, holiday hours at the YMCA, show the picture of a neighbor’s daughter’s wedding at your workplace. I’d pay $5 a month for that. Excellent journalists can discover and write about great local stories.
I think the reason talk radio is doing to well is that it serves those of us who are doomed to multi-tasking. Who these days has time to read a newspaper? Mobility rules. Its more productive when you have the radio on while you clean your garage, while you’re driving the kids to soccer practice. In America, if you’re not doing 8 things at once, you’re falling behind.
Hope this helps
I have been interested in your website since first learning about it. Your post about the implosion of newsprint information is certainly timely,on the local, state and national levels. International TV news reporting is abysmal and recently I notice most of the few correspondents have a British accent and are not employed by US news organizations. A recent NYT piece indicated a trend to let go experienced local TV anchors that know their communities well. In their place are put young inexperienced bright faces that don’t know the community or its history. Specifically I am most concerned about information in Michigan. I have access to what has seemed to me to be a very good local newspaper in Traverse City. However, the Record-Eagle does not have a Lansing bureau and it is difficult to find the legislative agenda,bills, etc. I find well over 90% of information about legislation is after the fact. Under these circumstances lobbyists and monied interests have a disproportionately influence on legislation particularly with inexperienced legislators resulting from term limits. An excellent example of this is the current Blue Cross Blue Shield legislation. As the number one health insurer in this state, any changes should be easily and readily available to citizens.
Although many of us get substantial information from the Internet, the problem is one of reliability, experience and accountability particularly from sources that are not commonly or well known such as a newspaper.